The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: How to Get Business Teams Closer to Customer Data (The Right Way)

Episode Date: May 13, 2024

The Data Stack Show is a weekly podcast powered by RudderStack, the CDP for developers. Each week we’ll talk to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists about their experience around building and maintaining data infrastructure, delivering data and data products, and driving better outcomes across their businesses with data.RudderStack helps businesses make the most out of their customer data while ensuring data privacy and security. To learn more about RudderStack visit rudderstack.com.

Welcome to the Data Stack Show prequel. This is a short bonus episode where we preview the upcoming show. You'll get to meet our guest and hear about the topics we're going to cover. If they're interesting to you, you can catch the full-length show when it drops on Wednesday. Welcome back to the Data Stack Show. We are here with Ryan McCreary, who is a product manager at Rudder Stack, so close to home. And Ryan, you've been building a bunch of stuff

that is intended to get business users closer to data. And I'm really excited to dig into that whole problem because I think it's been a topic of late, you know, in the last year or two in the data space, you know, or at least has reached fever pitch, you know, with venture different roles. So kind of approaching this from different phases of the customer journey. So started off in customer success engineering, working with our existing customers, moved from there into solutions engineering. So building higher level solutions for prospects and customers. And now I'm on the product team helping build out the actual solution that we needed this whole time. Awesome. Yeah. So Ryan, one of the topics I wanted to dig into was data activation.

I think I've had two or three conversations over just the last week around people complaining a little bit maybe on dashboards and like, oh, you make a dashboard, it gets to the table. And then really desiring like, hey, what if I could have the data and the tools I already use?

And I think that's one of the big things on data activation. So happy to talk about that. And then I'm excited to hear what you want to talk about. Yeah. So from a data activation perspective, I mean, that's kind of the impetus for what we're trying to accomplish with profiles and specifically with like that last bit of the activation piece. And so we've talked about this, you know, a lot internally, but to your point, like, yes, everyone's used to like the world of BI and, you know, here's a view into our data, but it's largely worthless if it doesn't, A, align with what they're seeing in the downstream tools, but also just being in the downstream tools is kind of the prerequisite to that. So, you know, a dashboard's great, but unless you can act upon it in the tool

where you live, whether you're marketing product, you know, advertising, anything like that, it's really largely useless. So really understanding not only how we model the data and visualize it, but then what do we actually do with it is kind of the key there. So that's kind of what we're, I guess, discussing today. Yeah, I'm excited. All right, well, let's dig in. All right, that's a wrap for the prequel. The full-length episode will drop Wednesday morning. Subscribe now so you don't miss it.